Politico's Sexist Portrayal of Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson Sets Twitterverse Off
Politico’s latest gossip garbage, entitled “Turbulence at the Times,” characterizes New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson as a “brusque,” “impossible,” “very, very unpopular” leader in a piece mostly sourced from anonymous staffers.
As many readers have observed, Dylan Byers’ takedown piece manages to condemn the Times’ first ever female editor for everything except her job performance. In the same piece that highlights Abramson’s “slow drawl” and tattoos, Byers notes that the Times just won four Pulitzers and garnered praise for its coverage of the Boston marathon bombing. The writer claims that Abramson is “on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom,” but is somehow “still respected there, while few doubt her wisdom or her experience.”
And then there’s this amazing quote from Times’ managing editor Dean Baquet:
I think there’s a really easy caricature that some people have bought into, of the bitchy woman character and the guy who is sort of calmer … That, I think, is a little bit of an unfair caricature.
It’s confounding to believe that Byers could’ve printed that quote without any consciousness of his own complicity in painting a “bitchy woman character.”
Twitter users immediately caught on to the article’s obvious sexism and responded with plenty of criticism and jokes. Read some of the best Twitter reactions to Politico’s blatant sexism, courtesy of Women’s Media Center:
